Checklist

• I added a descriptive title
• I searched open requests and couldn't find a duplicate

What is the idea?

Currently, the environment spec plugin api requires plugin authors to accept a source/file path as part of initialization. For example:

def __init__(self, source_path: str):
    # code to read the content

This means that every plugin needs to open up the file and read the same content. As the number of plugins grow, this can become a performance bottle neck. It would reduce the amount of io operations conda had to perform if plugins accepted the contents of the environment spec instead. Then conda (core) could do things like cache the file contents and provide a standardized way to read from different file sources.

Why is this needed?

No response

What should happen?

• Investigate if this approach provides an improvement in performance
• If so, let's update the api + all existing plugins that depend on these plugin hooks

Additional Context

No response